Any Mac friendly home servers out there ???

Posted:
in Future Apple Hardware edited January 2014
Looking for a home based 4 bay server.

NOT WINDOWS BASED!

Help!!



What in the world do MAC people do?



It should not be difficult. Lots of laptops selling.



I'm lost.



Any assistance welcome.



Thanks

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 5
    Actually, HP's Windows Home Servers have a lot of Mac-compatibility plugins. Especially the newest version.
  • Reply 2 of 5
    wizard69wizard69 Posts: 13,377member
    You are right about the limited selection of products design specfically for the Mac Market. An alternative would be something like a Drobo combined with a Mini at the low end. Drobo also now has a higher end model that uses a high speed Ethernet connection for communications. This might require a more substantial machine than a run of the mill garage sale Mini.



    The other option us the NAS class systems. I know some are capable of supporting a Mac very well but like the Drobo I'm lacking personal experience here. Plus in many cases buying an XServe might make better sense.



    Speaking of which the XServe is worth a look. In the end it is probably not that much more expensive than some of the other choices. Last I knew there was room for three drives plus a boot SSD. In otherwords it is not that bad of a server. It's expandable, reasonably high performance and comes with a familiar OS. Some may not like the units appearance, but the trick here is that you don't need to see it. Stick it in a closet, behind a desk or down in the cellar.



    In short the only answers you will get from Apple involve either a Mac Pro or XServe. Depending on you application the XServe might work out well, but do look at the Mac Pro. Yes I know the pro is expensive, but it can also be your primary machine. That is do double duty. The XServe is a little harder to setup as a dual purpose machine, though that is possible, so I'd rather see that as a server only.



    In any event what are you serving up? A Mini with a large HD and an external back up drive can solve media serving for some people and things like print and file serving are a snap. Obviously it is limited by the one internal drive to an extent but you can get RAID drives that plu into the FireWire port and still keep you costs reasonable. Persnally I don't like external drives for storage in this manner, if you need more than the internal capacity I'd suggest looking at the XServe and Pro.





    Dave
  • Reply 3 of 5
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Xtrail View Post


    Looking for a home based 4 bay server.

    NOT WINDOWS BASED!

    Help!!



    What in the world do MAC people do?



    It should not be difficult. Lots of laptops selling.



    I'm lost.



    Any assistance welcome.



    Thanks



    Depends on your price range. I'm using a synology ds409 at home (a bit pricey, ~$450 street without drives - I use 4 samsung 1TB drives in it, which was another $300 or so). It works fantastically with my macs. appletalk, samba/cifs, and nfs shares. itunes (daap) streaming, streaming for iphones and such, dlna/upnp server.



    The web front end is incredibly well designed and feels like a live, local app (and works fine in safari 4).



    The initial setup app to drop the firmware (really a small linux install payload) onto the NAS is straightforward and works native on osx.
  • Reply 4 of 5
    The Drobo-with-ethernet would be great for home use.
  • Reply 5 of 5
    mikefmikef Posts: 698member
    There are a couple of options for building a Linux/UNIX-based filer including OpenFiler or FreeNAS. These will give you a bunch of different capabilities, along with a web management interface.



    I use a server built on Ubuntu Linux and use SMB and NFS to share files with my two Macs.
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